Upgrades (and Downgrades)

On Wednesday the 21^st, things were finally starting to cool down for the first time in months... and so the universe thought to itself, "What better a time than to send out three dozen guys with their noise-and-bullshit machines to scrape up the perfectly good parking lot?"

As per OSHA regulations, there always has to be that one guy sitting around playing on his phone. So, special shoutout to my old buddy Cherkoff for leaving his crappy truck parked here going on two years now, so that 'Do-Rag could use it as a chair...

In the meantime, Leon and Ralph showed up to swap out the air conditioner on our living room that hasn't worked for more than a decade.

And since they showed up one day after we put in a request (instead of almost four days like last time), I decided to hook them both up with some peppers and tomatoes from our garden to show my appreciation. I still don't exactly like either one of them, but I'm slowly coming to dislike them less. So, progress, I guess?

While they were here, I pointed out how the outlet right next to the AC was melting all our plugs—and how we had to keep the microwave plugged in only halfway for it to work at all (creating a spectacular fire hazard, were the cats ever to try climbing the curtains just overhead and inadvertently touch the fabric to the exposed plug).

Leon asked me to put in a work order for it so he could come out later in the week to replace that too.

What the hell?! This almost feels... first-world or something!

Back outside, the noise was ceaseless and well-orchestrated: These guys really have it down to a science, right down to choreographing their forward and reverse maneuvers so that there's always at least one backup beeper going at any given time.

Not much else to say: They came; they saw; they contoured...

This Amazon driver had fortuitous timing and the easiest delivery ever...

If you were hoping to park close to your door and sleep in the next morning?

Nope! You're gonna get towed...

And, if you're a class-A narcissist who treats the handicapped spot as your own personal parking space even though you're perfectly able-bodied?

Nope! You're gonna get NO'ed, 'cause your spot doesn't even exist...

We weren't sure what was so special about the corners that warranted the excess excavation; but my fear was that they were going to put in heating coils under the handicapped spots and make "Fuggy" even more of a self-absorbed pseudo-celebrity than she already is :(

Then again, now that we know our crazy neighbor Ruth is basically a homicidal maniac, I suggested to Kitten that maybe she'd confessed to the cops where her previous victims are buried :)

Kitten and I walked out to get the mail together and decided to knock on Jeff and Lillian's door on our way back: I knew there was no way they hadn't heard the ruckus the night before; but I figured we could swap notes and see if they knew anything we didn't...

Lillian said she had been hearing regular commotion upstairs for more than a week now; and she and Jeff both said it sounded like someone "literally being body-slammed" multiple times the night before.

It turns out that Jeff was the one who called the cops and let them inside the building, and they're both (mildly) worried about the potential fallout since they figure Ruth has to know it was either them or us that called.

They introduced us to their tiny new puppy ("Turbo") too; and since the apartment complex has a No Pets policy now, I'm hoping for Jeff and Lillian's sake that Ruth is scared-shitless enough to keep her mouth shut and not complain about the yipping and barking.

Also, we finally had the bright idea to swap phone numbers with them after two years' worth of being friendly with each other.

On Thursday the 22^nd, the noise team was back in full force at the asscrack of dawn.

The first order of business seemed to be to turn Fuggy's handicapped spot into a hole to China though, and I was on board with that...

But by Friday, the curiosity was killing me; and I decided I was going to go out and ask the guys what the deal was here.

I waited until the mail had come and then I headed downstairs. I made it two steps from the door when Leon pulled up on his little tractor...

I will say though, Leon had the outlet fixed inside of three minutes!

Of course, you know he had to make up for his speediness somehow; so, rather than read the labels on the breaker box to see which circuit to disable, he just went down the panel and flicked everything off and on one by one until he found the circuit for the living room.

That's how the pros do it.

So, my PC got knocked out and I got to spend 10 minutes getting everything back to the state I'd left it.

Still, I was determined to unravel the mystery of the handicapped spot... and so I got a bunch of trash together so I could make the trek out to the dumpsters and hopefully get the scoop from one of the guys on my way back.

Naturally, the dozen guys who'd all been on break just minutes before were now all back to work; but luckily, Steamroller Guy #2 was sitting off to the side and waiting for his time to... um, roll the steam.

Perfect.

We chatted for five minutes or so, and he explained that the places where they'd dug down deeper were just soft spots they found while shaving off the top two inches of asphalt. (The soft spots just happened to coincide with the corners and the handicapped spots in our parking lot, I guess.)

He lamented the fact that everything around here is just solid clay (which I know all too well from having replaced a foot of soil in my garden at my parents' house back in 2021); and the clay never really fully dries out, and that creates soft spots over time.

He also told me the landlords had skimped on the project to cut down on the price: The paving guys recommended going down five inches, and the landlords insisted they only wanted to pay for two inches. But even going down just two, the guys found spots here and there that had basically nothing underneath them—hence the extra excavation so they could bring in some new gravel and re-pack and re-level everything before paving.

Friday the 23^rd they finished our section of the lot.

And I decided that asphalt is pretty weird when you think about it. It's almost, like, selectively non-Newtonian in a way.

It goes from being a solid...

...to being almost a liquid...

...and then back to being a solid...

...with an extra-crunchy hard spot for Fuggy's parking space...

I'm not a geneticist, but I noted that the company must've bred this one guy in the red shirt with all the guys wearing yellow shirts; and that's how the orange-shirts came to be...

Shoutout to 'Do-Rag, who worked his ass off despite that slow start on Day 1—and was really nice to Ditz's young son when he spotted the kid watching the guys work from the living-room window...

...and also a shoutout to Steamroller Guy #2, who was super friendly and happy to answer all my questions... and who might just hate clay even more than I do, which I think is pretty awesome :)

I guess I lucked out that Steamroller's job didn't begin until the rest of guys were finished...

...but then, that of course meant he was the last one to get to leave on Friday afternoon :/

The morning of Saturday the 24^th, Kitten got up early and made us pumpkin-spiced coffee and a loaf of pumpkin bread for breakfast (with a second loaf to take to my parents' house for dessert later).

Later in the afternoon, we headed over to my parents'—making a pit-stop at Riley's friend Kassie's, because Kassie had a gift she bought Riley on vacation, and Riley had baked a batch of cookies for Kassie.

We had dinner from Taormina's at my parents' house; and then I showed Liv some funny videos on YouTube and chased her and Hannah around the house.

At one point Hannah almost managed to completely two-dimensionalize herself between the front door and the screen door so it looked like that famous scene from The Shining...

There had been signs posted on the main doors to all the apartments, stating that the parking lot would "re-open" at 4:00 P.M. on Saturday; and when we got home, I was pleased to find that our neighbor Ditz had parked her car in the as-of-right-now-unmarked handicapped spot (thereby preventing Fuggy from monopolizing it).

In a classic case of the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law, anyone and everyone (us included, a few times) has been happily parking in that spot all week long—because, as we all know...

Whatever the reason, it seems that Fuggy's reign of terror has come to an end.

The karma has been nothing short of spectacular :)

We got some lovely news from our fiends at PECO Wednesday evening...

Amazing.

I hoped it would at least downpour on them all day...

...but I swear, it's like it just doesn't rain in southeast Pennsylvania anymore. It just gets gray for a day or two every now and then.

At any rate, Riley and I escaped to my parents' house so that she could still attend school and complete her assessment test.

Then Athennia came after work and my parents fed us dinner before we got on our way back home.

We knew we were back in Little Trenton territory when we pulled up next to this amazing machine...

Yech.

Friday morning, I woke up with Athennia when she got up to get ready for work.

I made myself some coffee and had just sat down at my desk, when our power went out for a split second—just long enough to knock out my computer.

How are those so-called "upgrades" working out, PECO? You couldn't even keep the juice flowing for a full 24 hours?!

That evening we had lunchmeat sandwiches for dinner—which is only worth mentioning since I've spent months ripping out all the mustard greens that kept coming up in my garden (I stopped planting them two years ago because nobody else wanted to eat them)... but now Athennia has been buying roast beef cold cuts, and I've been craving something horseradish-y to put on my sandwiches.

So, there was one lone mustard plant in the garden the day before, and I harvested it and brought it home so I could make the ultimate roast beef sandwich...

Behold!

After dinner Friday night, we heard thumping and knocking coming from the apartment downstairs; so I went to the living room window to investigate, and I found a white Mercedes backed up to our front door.

Ugh. New neighbors. We knew they'd be showing up eventually; but still... ugh.

They sounded just as loud as our previous downstairs neighbors, and I quickly decided I didn't like them. But then some time later Athennia told me she had been at the window when they left, and the husband had gone around the car and got the door for his wife.

Alright, alright. Maybe they won't be so bad.

But then they showed up again later with another carload of stuff to bring in... which included a bunch of little Fisher Price toys on par with things Hannah's playing with right now.

Ah, crap. A two-year-old at your age, guys? Really?!

That was the last we saw of them until this afternoon—when they showed up with a box truck and a small pickup truck.

I have to be honest: I hesitated publishing this; but, what Athennia and I watched unfold has to rank among the top 10 weirdest things I've ever seen...

Who packs and moves like this?

For the record, these are not our new neighbors: This is Phil McCrackin and Seymour Butts from Full Moon Movers, Incorporated...

But this is like... if your best friend's grandmother died and you got enlisted to help clean out the house... and your friend said not to worry about anything because it was all just going to the dump anyway... this is how you might load the truck. (And maybe not even then.)

Psst—hey, kid! Want some laundry?

We didn't have a dinner plan; so we decided we'd settle for Burger King.

When we got there, we found out that they discovered a way to make high fructose corn syrup taste like Fiery Strawberry Sprite. (And, I'm not gonna lie: I was pretty excited to try it.)

Alas, it was not to be: When the guy over the loudspeaker greeted us with an "I'll be with you in a few minutes," my hopes for a satisfactory visit were dashed.

Like, you're supposed to have me in and out again in a few minutes... not sitting here that long just to take my order.

We sat there for probably six or seven minutes. Then I took stock of the seven-car standstill ahead of us at the drive-thru windows, the line in the other drive-thru lane, and the line behind us in our lane.

Yeah, no.

You've lost, Burger King. And I'm demoting you: You don't even get to be Burger Prince. You're like Burger Earl, or Burger Duke.

Burger Jester. Except there was nothing funny about it.

So, Kitten and I headed up the road to Wawa instead—where we probably should've just gone to begin with, since the food's cheaper and higher quality. (And we could get cheesecake smoothies.)

Riley had said she wanted a burger, and I decided to get a "southwest" burger that I was too lazy to bother customizing; so, without really looking all that closely, I just ordered whatever comes standard on it.

A few minutes later we were seated around our kitchen table, and I tore into my burger. But I wasn't that impressed. I looked at Kitten and the Molerat with confusion.

Sure enough, Riley set down her smoothie to pop open her container; and there was a glorious-looking burger heaping with "southwest" ingredients.

I felt like a complete asshole, even though it was an honest mistake :(

Fortunately she had eaten two lunchmeat sandwiches not too long before and realized she wasn't as hungry as she'd thought she'd be; and so she didn't even want the half of her burger that I hadn't devoured yet :)

Pictures of Cats (Indiscriminate)

And when you look long into an abyssal food dish, the abyssal food dish also looks into you.

— Feedmich Meowtzsche, Beyond Food and Evil

And so, the judgment and the disapproving looks begin...

Then again, Luckminster Fuller looks hungry as well...

The Hunger Games?

Lucky emerges victorious, still the king of this town...

Odin decides to take his shame and head to parts unknown...

...Or maybe not, since there's a 289D sniffing around out there!

(That's an outdoor cat.)

Thus these felonious felines will warily continue coexisting...

Now, quickly! Everyone to the bedroom for a naptime truce...

Odin doing Odin things...

...And finally, some Russian blue matryoshki: Lucky sitting on Riley's lap, while Riley sits on Athennia's lap...